Are you a researcher in California who hails from the Global South? Are you interested in practicing open research – open access to your publications, sharing your data or software publicly, etc.? Do your experiences practicing open research differ in the U.S. compared to other countries you’ve worked in, particularly in the Global South? If so, we invite you to submit an abstract to a panel on “Global Researchers on OA Experience” which will be part of the conference on “An Open Digital Global South: Risks and Rewards.” The conference will be held at the University of California, Davis on May 25-26, 2017 and is sponsored by the Innovating Communication in Scholarship project (http://icis.ucdavis.edu).

This conference explores the promises and risks of openness in scholarship in relationship to the Global South. Research and scholarship are increasingly adopting ‘open’ models of practice and sharing, as open access publications, open data, and open source software. This openness supports improved research reusability, reproducibility, and visibility. Scholarly ‘openness’ is intended to facilitate the free flow of information, to address barriers to equitable access, and to foster global intellectual conversations. Do attempts at promoting openness in scholarship create new forms of exclusion or hierarchy in various regions of the world? How are Southern scholars and publishers’ experiences with open access and open data taken into account within conversations on developing standards and models for ‘open’ scholarship in the Global North? Are there unanticipated opportunities or risks created through the implementation of models for open data, open software, or open access to research?

The panel, “Global Researchers on OA Experience,” looks at how individual researchers experience the limitations and possibilities of open research practices on a day-to-day basis. In California, in particular, our research community reflects the global nature of scholarship, with many researchers hailing from the Global South. The diversity of experiences, perspectives, and knowledges enriches the university through expanding possibilities for innovation and research. How have international scholars’ open practices been shaped by working and studying at institutions in the Global North? This panel will serve as a conversation between local researchers on their experiences with open practices and how these are inflected or informed by their work in both the Global South and North.

Please submit 150 word abstracts describing your experiences with open practices—open data, open access, open source software—and how you handled issues related to gaining access to publications and research findings in universities in your country of origin as compared to your current university to Alexandra Lippman (alippman@ucdavis.edu) or Michael Wolfe (mrwolfe@ucdavis.edu)by May 3rd.

This short piece by Brad Weiss provides a reflection on Cultural Anthropology’s transition to open access publishing and a thoughtful discussion of the questions which drove this decision and the subsequent questions which exiting from Wiley-Blackwell has raised.

After the American Anthropological Association began publishing its journals through Wiley-Blackwell in 2004, critics from the Society for Cultural Anthropology wondered:

why should academics give the products of their scholarly labor—in the form of both their articles and their work as reviewers—to a for-profit press that generates its revenue by selling those products back to our home institutions in the form of (rather expensive) library subscriptions?

This question sparked the beginning of a journey towards open access. Read the rest of the story here:

Although the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is widely acknowledged to be a poor indicator of the quality of individual papers, it is used routinely to evaluate research and researchers. Here, we present a simple method for generating the citation distributions that underlie JIFs. Application of this straightforward protocol reveals the full extent of the skew of distributions and variation in citations received by published papers that is characteristic of all scientific journals. Although there are differences among journals across the spectrum of JIFs, the citation distributions overlap extensively, demonstrating that the citation performance of individual papers cannot be inferred from the JIF. We propose that this methodology be adopted by all journals as a move to greater transparency, one that should help to refocus attention on individual pieces of work and counter the inappropriate usage of JIFs during the process of research assessment.

David Novak is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with affiliations in Anthropology, Film and Media Studies, and East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies. His work deals with the globalization of popular music, remediation, protest culture, and social practices of listening. He is the author of the award-winning Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (2013) and the co-editor of Keywords in Sound (2015), as well as recent essays and sound recordings in Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, Popular Music, Sensory Studies, and The Wire. He is the founder of the Music and Sound Interest Group in the American Anthropological Association, and co-director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music.

Frontiers is a leading Open Access scholarly journal publisher, with 55 journals in many disciplines and growing. In addition to rising journal Impact Factors, Frontiers is advancing article-level and author metrics as new ways of measuring the impact of research. A growing number of UC Davis faculty members edit Frontiers journals and have gained experience with this new publishing model and its benefits and challenges for publishing research. Join us for a look at the benefits of Open Access publishing for improving research impact through increased citations, and a cross-disciplinary panel of five UC Davis editors, on how Frontiers has worked in practice.

It is by Barbara Fister and discusses some of her thoughts, as a librarian, on Sci-Hub.

Thanks again to Art Shapiro for pointing me to this.

I am still not sure how I feel about SciHub. I like that people can get access to more literature. But I would prefer that that happened by legal means and I think I agree with Fister that this is “not the fix for the mess we’re in.”